Over the past several decades, public awareness of the benefits of exercise has risen. These benefits include better health, lower stress, improved productivity and overall enhanced quality of life.
One result of this increased awareness has been the profusion of commercial health clubs and a growing sophistication and use of “home” or private gyms. These facilities offer consumers the opportunity to achieve higher levels of physical fitness, and claim to have the latest equipment and methods. Overall, the methods and devices are used to address, separately or in combination, the main physiological categories of physical fitness, performance and health. The main categories of physiological adaptation include: cardiovascular (heart, lungs and circulation), strength (muscles and bones), flexibility and neuromuscular coordination. Individually, or in combination, improvements in these categories are usually described, in a general way, as improved “fitness”. The available equipment and methods used typically include a wide variety of devices for use in cardiovascular workouts, such as elliptical trainers, exercise bicycles, treadmills and step machines. Other, separate equipment, such as weight machines and free weights, is also provided for workouts intended to increase muscular strength and improved bone health. Still more space, equipment and a variety of methods are commonly made available to allow participants to address the remaining essential components of health and fitness such as flexibility, balance and neuromuscular coordination. Thus, at any particular fitness facility, each piece of equipment, and each corresponding exercise, relates exclusively to a narrow component of overall fitness (e.g. a weight machine that works a single muscle group).
As a result, those using health clubs find themselves having to spend a great deal of time moving from one piece of equipment to another to get a comprehensive workout, or focusing each particular workout session addressing one or a small combination of the main physical fitness categories. The result is that a health club user will either spend a great deal of time at the club to make sure that he works out comprehensively and adequately, or will spend less time at the health club than is optimally necessary and therefore and have inadequate workouts, thereby achieving less than optimal fitness, performance or health-related benefits for their efforts. These time-related inefficiencies associated with health clubs are exacerbated by the fact that using a health club requires the user to be away from home, requiring time for travel to and from the health club. Furthermore, health club equipment is often physiologically non-comprehensive, particularly in the area of muscular strength and neuromuscular coordination. Thus, even spending a lot of time at a health club may not result in an adequate workout.
As a result of the problems associated with using health clubs, some people exercise at home. However, this approach presents its own problems. Most people cannot, because of cost and space constraints, obtain the various pieces of equipment that they (rightly or wrongly) believe are required for a comprehensive workout. Apart from the fact that this lessens the effectiveness of the workouts, there are often fewer options available for particular aspects of the workouts. For example, a person exercising from home may have no option for cardiovascular exercise other than running. However, over-reliance on one particular form of activity can produce over-use injury. For example, over time, running can be very hard on ankles, knees, hips and back, and if the person develops an injury, he may be denied his only cardiovascular exercise option. Similarly, people who wish to achieve muscle strengthening at home typically come up against the challenge represented by the narrow physiological specificity of each piece of equipment (such as a barbell and its particular or isolated muscle group), the limited space available and the financial constraints inherent in accumulating a sufficient amount of strength training equipment to allow the opportunity for a comprehensive muscle strengthening program.
Apart from the risk of over-use injury, the challenge of lack of space in combination with the limited time available, the likelihood of boredom followed by non-compliance because of lack of variety, and the like, such home workouts do not adequately and comprehensively address the main physiological categories of physical fitness, performance and health, namely cardiovascular (heart, lungs and circulation), strength (muscles and bones), flexibility and neuromuscular coordination. For example, a person who exercises at home by jogging and doing nothing else may not obtain adequate workouts in the areas of strength, flexibility and neuromuscular coordination. The individual who adds a few dumbbells or other specific pieces of strengthening equipment, in addition to the treadmill or stationary bicycle, is still in deficit because of the lack of comprehensiveness within the muscular strengthening category as well as the paucity of options for flexibility and neuromuscular coordination. People who wish to exercise anywhere (at a gym, at home, while traveling or in the office), have long sought a solution that meets the challenges presented by fitness comprehensiveness, space, time, variety and cost.
As a result, there have been attempts to create an apparatus to facilitate effective exercise at home. One such apparatus is disclosed in U.S. published application number US 2004/0067827 (“Tustin”). Tustin discloses an exercise device consisting of a simple elastic natural gum rubber band formed in a closed loop. The band may be manufactured in a variety of thicknesses, lengths, and widths to suit the size and muscular strength of the user. The user can use the band for a variety of strengthening exercises, by using various muscles to pull or push the band to a stretched position. The band is elastic, and therefore, offers resistance to being stretched. The relevant muscles are thus worked by stretching the band repetitively.
The Tustin device suffers from a number of defects. First, each individual band has a fixed length and fixed resistance level. Therefore, if the band is too short or too long to be used by a particular user, or if it offers too much or too little resistance for a particular user, it will be necessary for the user to permanently alter the band by shortening it or purchase a new, longer band if lengthening (for larger body size or less resistance) is required. Second, in Tustin, each individual band has a fixed resistance depending on the physical characteristics of the band (such as the material, its width and thickness). Two important elements of appropriate strengthening exercise are: 1) overall tension adjustment (preferably incremental to allow the user to operate within the narrow range between muscle failure and muscle accomplishment, because this where strength adaptation occurs) and 2) specific muscle or muscle group adjustment which takes into account the variable size of muscle groups within the body and the need therefore for a specific tension range suitable for that muscle or group depending on its size and strength characteristics. In the Tustin device, if an individual user wanted more overall resistance or altered resistance for a particular muscle group, he would have to either permanently alter or purchase a new band.
Third, rubber bands tend to have decreased resistance the further they are stretched. In other words, when initially stretched from their un-stretched position, rubber bands have a relatively high tension. As the band stretches out much further, the resistance/tension of the stretched rubber decreases—in a manner that is not linear, making its ability to resist distortion even less, the longer it gets. This works against the principle of muscle overload (which is the physiological/biomechanical basis for strength increase) in that during the time in a contraction when the largest amount of muscle mass is being used (approaching full extension as defined by the length-tension relationship of individual contracting muscle fibers), the resistance offered by the elastic is actually decreasing (as described by the force required to distort it by a specific unit of measurement).